Virtually all grew up as Muslims, after their grandparents converted from the Armenian Orthodox faith or married to escape persecution. Hardly any speak Armenian, and in many cases it was only on reaching adulthood that their parents even dared to pass on the knowledge of their ancestry.

“Until I was 18, I didn’t know anything about anything Armenian,” said one such woman, Güzide Diker, who grew up speaking Kurdish in a village in eastern Turkey. Like the rest of the family, and everyone else in the area, she was brought up to be Muslim. Knowledge of the region’s long Armenian history in some places disappeared within two generations.

“When I was 18, my older brother called me and with my mother told me I could choose what religion I wanted,” she said.

There followed an onslaught of proportions unprecedented in modern history as the empire tried to expel the entire Armenian population, numbering several million. In the east, where most lived, soldiers and Kurdish gangs – many of them bandits released from prison for the purpose – ambushed the long trails of humanity being herded into the Syrian deserts to the south, shooting and bayonetting as many men as they could, with countless women and children, too.

“My father was four, and saw five men spear his mother to death in front of him,” said Aydan Tüt, a taxi driver, who still carries with him his father’s identity card showing his grandfather’s Armenian name. “He was saved by two Kurds on horseback who came and rescued him, saying the child should be spared.”

Those Kurds brought up the Armenian orphan as their own.

The diaspora’s historians say 1.5 million died. Those who survived the killings and the starvation that followed scattered, some to Syrian cities, where they remain, suffering new attacks in the civil war, some to what became Soviet Armenia, some to the West.

A handful of families remained fearfully in the larger cities of eastern Turkey, like Diyarbakir, but in an atmosphere of hostility both between Turks and Kurds, and towards Christian minorities, they gradually dissipated, too.

A woman walks past an archive photograph during an exhibition about the Armenian Genocide at the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan (AFP/Getty Images)

A decade ago, just one elderly Armenian couple survived and claimed their Christian heritage in Diyarbakir, the largest Kurdish city in the country.

But then the politics changed again. As the Kurds emerged from decades of their own struggles with the Turkish government, they acquired more autonomy, and their leaders announced that they saw the Armenians, with their long history of persecution even before 1915, as fellow victims of Turkish nationalism, rather than an enemy within.

In a meeting in the town of Bitlis on Sunday to introduce a visiting delegation of Armenians from round the world to representatives of the Kurdish communities that killed their forebears, one Kurdish former mayor, Behvad Serefhangder, stood to make his own declaration of responsibility.

He said he had been brought up on tales of how local Kurds had ambushed a column of 600 men, tied them up, and burned them to death. The same story is recorded in the accounts of survivors held in the modern Armenian capital, Yerevan. Now, he said, he wanted to open up his home to Armenians – it was a home his father had bought from a man who had seized it from the Armenians he had killed.

Opening up the past in this fashion remains a sensitive matter, particularly in an impoverished region. Some “hidden” Armenians, including Mr Tüt, have begun legal cases to have the lands their families owned returned to them – the Armenians were generally richer than the pastoralist, sometimes nomadic Kurds, and plunder was a major motivation for the attacks.

Fear of having property taken away is a potent weapon for Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), which has allowed greater autonomy for Kurdish politics but has also become the main rival for votes for the Kurdish parties.

A man walks past archive photographs during an exhibition about the Armenian Genocide at the Armenian Genocide Museum in Yerevan (AFP/Getty Images)

There are also religious sensibilities. The local authorities in Diyarbakir contributed some of the cost of restoring the 14th-century Surp Giragos – St George’s – Church, now the largest functioning Armenian Orthodox Church in theMiddle East.

Opened as a symbol of multiculturalism – the local district mayor, Abdullah Demirbas, said he had visited and been inspired by the London boroughs of Hackney and Haringey – it has become the centre of revived interest in the faith.

Some two dozen local Muslims of Armenian descent have reconverted to Christianity, a brave act close to the border with Islamic State-occupied Syria.

“There are Isis supporters among the Kurds,” said Miss Diker, who learned of her Armenian grandmother when she was 18 and now acts as a volunteer guide at the church. She has not converted, but is nevertheless reading the Bible “to see what she thinks”.

The church’s community leader, Gaffur Turkay, has become Christian, along with one of his brothers. His seven other brothers and sisters remain Muslim, while his father completed the Hajj or pilgrimage to Mecca last year.

Gafur Turkay, an Armenian community leader whose grandfather was adopted by kurds after the genocide, he found out he was a Turkish Armenian when he was 20, and in subsequent years re converted back to the Armenian Orthodox faith (David Rose/The Telegraph)

In the small town of Mutki, near Bitlis, the visiting Armenians, led by a British-Armenian historian Ara Sarafian, toured a hillside quarter that remains home to 300 descendants of just three genocide survivors. The group was welcomed by the local Kurdish mayor, while Onur Ay, a part Armenian, part Kurdish local lawyer, showed off the ruined house where he had been born.

Other “hidden Armenians” remained hidden, though, not coming out of their houses. When the party had gone, some younger men emerged to say that even now, and even though they might be three quarters or seven eighths Kurdish, old hostilities remained.

Prayers at a religious service at the cathedral in Etchmiadzin, outside Yerevan, ahead of the canonization ceremony for the Martyrs of the Armenian Genocide (PICTURE: AFP PHOTO)

The aggression towards Armenians did not stop with the end of the massacres. They sat and listened to the tale of Bogas Tomasian, a full Armenian whose grandfather survived a massacre nearby because he was the village ox-yoke maker, and said that growing up Armenian as a child meant constant bullying and violence. His family finally fled in 1963, and he now lives in Switzerland.

Onur Ay’s relatives, when they did agree to talk, suggested things had not changed much. “Even today, there is still a social stigma,” said Yavuz Kaya, the local headman. “As you can clearly see, of 300-400 of us, only a few youngsters have appeared to speak. The others are still too scared to embrace their Armenian identity.

Surp Giragos or the Church of Saint Kyriakos in Diyarbakir. This church had fallen into disrepair and was abandoned by the turkish Armenian community here when they were driven away or forced to convert to Islam in the early part of this century. (David Rose/The Telegraph)

“We are constantly humiliated. If I walk down the street even now, 100 people will call me names. This is how it is.”

The Armenians are coming out – there may be a million or more people in Turkey with Armenian ancestry. But it is still a slow process.